PowerMail 5 feature overview

• Better at fighting spam:
  • Built-in filters enhancement for dealing with spam
  • Tight integration with SpamSieve for best efficiency
• Improved performance and functionality:
  • Now ships as Mac OS X-only Mach0 binary (requires Mac OS X 10.2 or later)
  • Much faster when fetching, filtering and storing messages
  • Many more filter actions (including by content)
  • Delete messages after "n" days in the Mail trash
  • Ability to process incorrectly-decoded messages again
  • Long file names and alias support for attachments
  • Ability to export attachments along with messages
• User interface enhancements:
  • Fully customizable toolbars in mail browser, recent mail, message window, address book and setting dialogs, with extra addable toolbar buttons
  • New multiple "Undo" feature on moving messages, change status, marrk read/unread, mark as spam/mark as good
  • Ability to use System sounds and custom sounds
  • New filter interface eases editing of complex rules
  • Configurable Address history and Recent mail view
  • Supports .sitx decompression if Stuffit Engine is present
  • Integrated and customizable Mac OS X toolbar
  • Live resizing of windows
  • Better organization of the Scripts menu

PowerMail 5 feature detail

• 35 new features:
  • The performance of various operations (including fetching mail) have been improved on large databases.
  • PowerMail now supports long unicode filenames and extension hiding (especially for attachments)
  • PowerMail can now use any sound in your Library/Sounds folders, and you can also store custom sounds in the "Custom Sounds" folder of your PowerMail database folder.
  • PowerMail is now fully integrated with SpamSieve, for spam filtering
  • New filter conditions, especially for spam filtering:
    • an AppleScript can now be used as a mail filter condition
    • FoxTrot-like operator for the subject and to/from
    • from, sender or reply-to
    • Content Type, to filter HTML messages
    • - folder is / is not
    • label is / is not
    • - attachment name, type, creator and size
    • - recipient uses your full name
    • - from/sender is in previous recipients
    • spam level (requires SpamSieve or other third party spam filter)
  • New filter actions:
    • - auto reply can now specify to reply to all or to reply to sender only
    • - don't show in recent mail
    • - don't index
    • - add recipient
    • add/remove subject prefix
    • - remove extra re: from subject
    • raise / lower spam level
    • move, copy or alias attachments
  • Any condition or action within a mail filter can now be inserted or deleted (one could previously only append or delete the last item)
  • Outgoing filters are now applied before sending a message (instead ofafter), so you can add a BCC recipient, or change the sending account automatically.
  • Improve the organization of the scripts menu and supports both long filenames and extension hiding
  • PowerMail can now compress and decompress .sitx StuffIt attachments, if the Stuffit engine is present.
  • Added the ability to delete only the messages that are in the trash for more than n days upon quitting PowerMail.
  • Messages that have been incorrectly decoded (because the charset information in the header was wrong or missing) can be redecoded by specifying the character set manually.
  • Address history can now be configured to save only the recipient addresses of outgoing messages, to not the sender addresses of received messages (which can be spam)
  • Windows are now refreshed in real time when resized
  • The toolbar is now customizable, and is included in all windows, instead of being a floating toolbar window
  • During a drag and drop operation, hitting the space bar will do an immediate spring loading of the folder under the mouse, or will bring the window under the mouse to the front
  • Attachment references can now be deleted from AppleScript
  • Added a new built-in AppleScript allows to reattach attachments that have been lost
  • The message status can now be changed between incoming status (read, unread, replied...) and outgoing status (draft, sent...) via AppleScript. Usefull to change the status to sent, for messages that have been imported
  • The reply popup menu, in the toolbar, now enables replying to any of the from/sender/reply-to/to/cc address
  • When replying to a message, or clicking on a mailto URL, you can now close the message with no confirmation dialog if you didn't type anything in it
  • Reply single message is now available also in the reply button popup within the toolbar
  • A new popup menu appears at the bottom of the message when the header contains some useful URLs (to manage mailing lists for example)
  • When clicking a mailto URL in a message, the message is now created with the same account as the message containing the URL
  • The "perform mail filters again" option, in the "mark as good" preference, automatically resets the label to none before filtering the message again
  • The attachment folder is now primarily identified using a path relative to the database, then an alias is used if it has been renamed or moved.
  • The toolbar settings are now saved in the PowerMail database, in addition to the user's library folder; consequently, using the database from another user or another machine will keep the toolbar settings
  • Now inclused the German-language resources in addition to French and English
  • Compacting the database now automatically performs a verification of the database consistency
  • When verifying the consistency of the database, the attachment references are now updated, in case they have been moved or renamed; it is recommended to go through this step of compacting before you copy your database and your attachment folder to another machine, disk or volume, or before making a backup or archive.
  • A dot is now drawn in the close box of windows that needs to be saved
  • "Connect again" command added to the dock menu
  • When a connection error occurs during a scheduled connexion, it is now possible to "snooze" the error notification for one hour, from the error dialog, or from the dock menu.
  • The search index can now be rebuilt from the PowerMail First Aid dialog (when launching PowerMail with the command and option keys pressed), instead of the mail/database menu. Additionaly, if the index is corrupted when PowerMail is launched, it is automatically rebuilt.
  • When exporting the database, you can now include the attachments in the exported mailbox file.
• 22 fixes and improvements
  • Fixes SMTP AUTH login issues with several providers, including AOL
  • Corrupt messages that do not have an empty line to delimit the end of the message header were previously not saved in the database, and thus were re-downloaded at each connection
  • When forwarding a message, or when saving it as a text file, the "reply-to" field was labeled as "from" (when reply-to is configured in the short header preferences)
  • The command and option keys are no longer used when running a script from the scripts menu, so it is now possible to use Mac OS 10.3's keyboard shortcuts
  • Some erroneous drawing could occur on the menubar when using the contextual menu
  • Clicking a mailto URL that specify a BCC recipient now works properly
  • Some square characters were displayed in particular incorrectly encoded messages (when line-feed characters were quote-printable encoded)
  • When displaying a message whose attachments have been renamed or moved, the internal attachment reference is updated, which makes resolution more reliable
  • Reply, forward and redirect did not work from a script called from an incoming filter
  • Improved the way exceptions are handled upon compacting
  • Fixed QIE error 9 in 2, which would happen on startup in case the Foxtrot search index file was corrupt; this could also cause a subsequent inability to quit
  • Moved the "Rebuild Index" option from the menu bar to the PowerMail First Aid dialog, where is should have been in the first place
  • Moved the progress indicator from a separate floating window into the main browser
  •  
    • Formerly, we would try to delete the .tmp file when it was not yet closed, which caused a -47 secondary exception within the exception itself (file is busy)
    • Now, the .tmp file gets closed before deletion and primary-cause errors get displayed properly
  • When an attachment has no filename (or when a message contains multple HTML parts), the attachment is now created using the message subject as filename, instead of "Enclosure" or "Enclosure.html".
  • When performing long operations that show a progress window, the message list was updated in real time. It is now updated only when the action is terminated, and this should be faster (example: when you empty the mail trash, while the trash is selected in the mail browser)
  • When accessing a folder content by AppleScript, the unread messages were not returned if the "view unread" option is enabled for this folder. This is no longer the case.
  • The fiter "add sender to address book group" was creating contacts that do not belong to any folder nor to the root level of the address book.
  • A crash could occur when an auto-reply filter is applied to a pure HTML message.
  • Previously, some japanese text in received messages could be displayed using a chinese font (or vice versa), or some japanese text in sent messages could be encoded using a chinese charset (or vice versa), if the "preferred language family" preference was not set correctly. This should no longer happen, because the font used to type outgoing messages, the system language, and the charset of incoming messages, are now used to make the choice between chinese and japanese.
  • When redirecting a message with an attachment that does not have been encoded with base 64 or quote printable, the attachment was deleted
  • When performing a search, the messages that have been received and deleted (moved to the trash, then the trash has been emptied) since the last search occurred, were added to the search index. They were of course not displayed in the search result, but it would waste disk space and compute time.

PowerMail 5 can be downloaded from the PowerMail download page.

Orders can now be placed for upgrades or new PowerMail 5 licenses from here.

SpamSieve can be also ordered as part of a special bundle or upgrade bundle with PowerMail 5 from here.

Note to current PowerMail users: Upon first launch, PowerMail 5 will suggest either updating your database or creating a new one. Converting your database is a one-way street, so make sure you have followed the previous step first.

One of the most important features of PowerMail 5 is its inclusion of tools to efficiently combat spam.

For best efficiency, you will be best off knowing thy enemy (i.e. which messages are offending) and your friends (i.e. people in your address book). Regardless of your particular situation, we have tried to make the setup process as simple as possible.

Design philosophy

• Minimize the risk of not seeing mail that might have been treated as spam: this requirement implies actually fetching mail messages, even partially, in order to process them.
• Be tolerant about mistakes and allow reversibility: no spam filtering scheme is perfect; false positives (good messages marked as spam) and false negatives (spam marked as good messages) inevitably occur
• Open to the most appropriate solution for each user. PowerMail 5 offer new filter features that do a decent job at weeding out with moderate spam. If spam has already become a major pain for you, PowerMail will do stellar job at integrating third-party tools such as SpamSieve™.

  The basic approach is an detailed extension of PowerMail's filters; first, one needs to determine whether a message looks like spam or not. If so, any number of actions can be applied to it.

  Additional functionality allows the user to correct errors, and even teach smart filters such as SpamSieve ways to improve future sorting.

New spam-related features

Spam rating database field and list column
PowerMail 5 stores a rating between 0 and 100 for each message. This rating is either assigned via filters or manually. This rating can be displayed as a bar graph in message lists by clicking the appropriate checkbox in the View Options dialog

Additional filter conditions

Spam rating
PowerMail can take action based on a message's spam rating being equal or higher to a given value; this is typically determined by a third-party tool such as SpamSieve.

HTML part filter
This allows detection of HTML parts in messages; as good e-mail etiquette suggests that HTML messages are to be sent with a plain text part as well, this condition allows the creation of mutually exclusive filters. When a message is found ONLY to have an HTML part, the message gets a rating of 50 and this rating can be further incremented or decremented by the raise/lower spam rating filter action (see below)

Subject/body contains at least one of the words
In order to fine-tune your manually-definded filters, it is now possible to filter based on the inclusion of one of a list of words (i.e. "wholesale Viagra guaranteed Windows inches medication pharmacy mortgage" in a single filter.

Number of recipients is
Spam messages tend to have no recipients set, while unwanted announcements can have large recipient lists; this condition can be useful alongside others.

Attachment name
Windows executables (.exe) or picture files (.pif) are some of the preferred vectors for viruses; PowerMail 5 now offers the possibility to filter on attachment names so as to further characterize unwanted messages.

AppleScript as filter condition
Before PowerMail 5, a filter could only specify an AppleScript as an action; now you can also have scripts which operate as filter conditions, which means that in certain cases or all cases you can have an AppleScript become your fully customizable filtering system, with PowerMail executing whatever action (built-in and/or another AppleScript) you choose.

Additional filter actions

Evaluate spam rating
Depending on how the assistant configured your filter, this action will either call upon SpamSieve or rely on the server-set X-Spam headers to assign a spam rating to a message

Raise / lower spam rating
This action allows either to raise or lower the spam rating for a given message

Spam assistant

To make the setup experience as painless as possible, PowerMail 5 includes an assistant that will set up all the necessary spam filtering for you.

Spam preference pane

This is where you define what exactly happens upon marking a message as spam or as good.

If you are upgrading from PowerMail 4 and were using SpamSieve before:

PowerMail will automatically disable those filters which made use of the AppleScripts which used to be necessary to integrate SpamSieve.

When using SpamSieve, the sensitivity slider is disabled, as all of the evaluation work is done within SpamSieve itself; options are to be set within the SpamSieve user interface.

When creating spam filters, the spam assistant will place them at the top; you can, and probably should re-order your filters in the following order:

1. known good messages (work domain, mailing lists, usual newsletters):

   This way, messages that might look to SpamSieve as spam (such as newsletters and mailing list traffic) that you legitimately want to receive will be processed first by your custom filters; don't forget to add a "stop processing this message" action at the end of such filters

2. spam-related filters

   So as to move spam out of the way before going on with filtering

3. all other filters

   If you've setup filters for dealing with spam before, we recommend that you disable the "Apply to incoming messages" checkbox for each of them before starting. Eventually, you will be able to delete them entirely.

Another thing you may want to do is clean up your address book by deleting known senders of spam from it, and adding likely senders of good messages. If you have a list of messages whose senders you would like added in one go, create a special filter with the "add to address book" action applied to all messages, then select the messages whose senders you want added and use the appropriate "Perform filter" menu item to them. Once you're done, make sure that you disable or delete this filter, as all senders will otherwise be added.

Using PowerMail with X-Spam headers

1. If your ISP's mail server features server-side rating of spam, we encourage you to use this option in the Spam Filter assistant, as PowerMail can use the server's rating (indicated in X-Spam style headers) in order to set qualify fetched messages.

   Using PowerMail with SpamSieve

   PowerMail and SpamSieve versions 2.1.3 and greater are fully integrated. In order to train SpamSieve, just select messages and use the "Mark as Spam" and "Mark as Good" features, which will both train SpamSieve and enhance its corpus as well as internally qualify these messages in the PowerMail database.

   Customize your toolbar

   You can change the order in which the "Mark as Spam" and "Mark as Good" buttons are displayed in your toolbar for Recent Mail or Mail Browser windows (or both).

FAQ

Why isn't there a "bounce" feature ?

Some mail clients offer a "bounce" feature, which creates a message to the sender that pretends to be a server-side rejection. In our experience, we have found tha t spammers actually derive some useful information about this and things actually get worse - thus our choice not to include this. This can however be performed using an AppleScript if needed.

What does the "addressed to full name" option do ?

This will try to match the RFC 822 address for received messages to include all of the words (even if in a different order) that are in the Real name field in the fetching account's Identity pane

How do "X-Spam" headers, such as those inserted by SpamAssassin-equipped servers, influence a message's Spam rating ?

PowerMail will give a spam rating of 5 points for each star (*) in the X-Spam header up to 10 stars. This can be combined with a filter which raises or lowers the spam rating based on other factors and/or with the filter action which determines whether an HTML part is present.